Hello. I'd like to thank the committee for having us here today to speak about remuneration for artists and the important issue of recognizing and ensuring robust statutory and moral intellectual property rights for audiovisual performers in the Canadian Copyright Act.
My name is David Sparrow. I am a working actor. For almost 30 years, I have been a member of the gig economy, a precarious worker, and an artist. I have appeared in over 100 film and television roles and on stages across North America. That comparatively successful career does not necessarily make me a household name or financially stable. This is a tough business.
I am also the president of ACTRA, the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists, where I help to represent 25,000 professional audiovisual English-language performers across Canada, who work to give voice to a wide diversity of Canadians, to help define Canadian culture and to project our culture to the world.
The average Canadian unionized performer earns less than $11,000 per year through work in film, TV and other recorded media. They build their careers by working in a number of different media and earning small incomes from a number of different sources. Every one of these micropayments is important and helps to pay the bills between gigs.
It is unfortunate that Canada has famous celebrities of years gone by who worked under terms that didn't include intellectual property protection, so that today, in their senior years, they are living in poverty and in subsidized housing. ACTRA has taken steps to negotiate use provisions into our contracts to ensure performers are paid for their work throughout its use, but the fact remains that we need strong copyright provisions to underpin our rights as audiovisual performers.
I am here today to make the case for the Copyright Act to be extended to audiovisual performers. Residuals and royalties, payments for the use and exploitation of our work here at home and around the world, are the fair compensation all performers deserve.
By example, through our negotiated contracts, I personally receive between $4,000 and $8,000 per year in royalties from the over 100 projects that I spoke of earlier. Do the math. It's not a lot of money.
We need a made-in-Canada copyright solution that will give performers, their unions and collection societies the tools that they need to go after the remuneration they are owed. Strong copyright law guards against unauthorized use or misuse of an artist's work. There are international treaties that Canada can carefully implement to address these issues, but we can start by amending the Copyright Act to ensure Canadian audiovisual performers enjoy the same copyright protections that our audio performers already enjoy under the act.
ACTRA is certainly available and willing to help or consult further with the committee to arrive at strong language that will do no harm and will address these issues in the Canadian context.
I will now pass you over to Laurie McAllister, who is ACTRA's director of the Performers' Rights Society and the Recording Artists' Collecting Society, PRS/RACS, for more insights and detail. Laurie also serves on the board of SCAPR, an international coordinating body of 60 performers' collective management organizations from 43 countries, working to improve the exchange of data and performers' rights payments across borders.
Go ahead, Laurie.